A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead.
Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and lightweight chat app, right in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the time!
Google has failed to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it's proprietary. This time, it's much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones?
So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and they used their Android market share to do that. People didn't like it, still used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because everybody's gotta reinvent the wheel.
You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn't up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it's a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything. Who's making these decisions exactly?
Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it's honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord (https://discordapp.com/) for essentially all my communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms tech, even as an open protocol). It's proprietary, but at least it gives me text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn't suck - and there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.
It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever.
And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose.
People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.
Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s
Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie...
Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).
Aside:
>It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers.
I have a shared account on a small ISP, Microsoft won't receive our emails, even when replying to an email from a Microsoft user, even when user whitelisted. [It's probably the same with some other suppliers?] The only way to reply to people using Outlook/Hotmail/Live (I'm a user of hotmail for something like 16 years) is now to send via MS servers - basically had to make an account for this purpose.
The sending IPs aren't blacklisted with Senderscore (or other blacklists, I mention senderscore because they apparently provide domain reputation services for MS); some "related IPs" have medium reputation scores (senderscore 72).
(I was a Google SRE, sitting near the talk team. Everyone wanted XMPP to succeed, but the numbers didn't even come close to working out)
Imagine if they thought like that about email?
Open federated protocols with no obligation for providers to upgrade as the security landscape changes are a betrayal of user security and privacy of the highest order.
HTTPS is only becoming reasonable because Google can use its monopoly power and forced upgrade mechanism to bully website owners into adopting better practices. If we had a fragmented ecosystem of many open source browsers with user-consent upgrades and similar market share like the open web people wanted, certificate transparency would remain academic.
Personally, I consider the median advocate of open federated protocols to be more culpable for the wholesale violation of user privacy than the median NSA staffer.
I absolutely agree with you though, Discord is one product done right, runs everywhere, and everyone I ask to "join my discord" I can't even get rid of them once they're on it, and if I stop going on they nag at me. I secretly wish Discord had been based out of some open standard because it is well done.
I want to highlight that this is not realistically possible for anyone, not right now anyway.
When Discord was created, XMPP was the only option if you wanted to adopt an open standard, and it was absolutely not up to the task. Matrix was also an option but far too new.
Discord is a startup, and is run as a business (just like Slack). If you were at the head of a startup in the messaging space, and there were no reasonable open source options for messaging, you'd design your own. This is a hard process; making it an open protocol from the get-go removes a lot of your freedom.
I used to say (even here on HN) that Google was our best hope at creating a modern open source messaging protocol, by improving Hangouts and making it open. They have utterly failed.
I am confident Discord is our next best hope... assuming they succeed. Otherwise, it's back to waiting for Matrix to finish playing catchup.
It was actually fascinating, because it was among the most viscerally negative reactions I've ever had to a piece of software.
It reminded me of that trick where you play back someone's speech to them in a very slight delay and it becomes very difficult for them to speak, only in this case with my inner monologue while trying to participate in a conversation.
Really impressively disturbing and uncomfortable. An amazing feat, but not something I will ever use.
Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email.
To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and won messaging handily; its lead was cemented by the acquisition of WhatsApp on 2014-02-19, as Google continued to flail about.
In a post of mine last year [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06.
So a lot of influential management thinks going full FB is the way to go. But a lot of other people at Google think open standards are still the way of the future, or can be if a company like Google is willing to champion them.
The result of all of this is a complete and utter dumpster fire from a product perspective. It's the classic "if we're not pulling together then we're rowing against each other" problem. I think Google would be able to execute just fine if they could settle on what they want to achieve. Instead we have this.
This is actually really, really important to people.
In fact, that's precisely what they did. The old talk app for android worked fine, even before they terminated federation.
Hangouts failed both.
Google had (no longer has, IMO) the clout to design and drive a solid, open source messaging protocol with a reference implementation, sitting in the inbox of hundreds of millions of users and on hundreds of millions of phones. Instead, they created a slow, mediocre, closed source product that didn't interact well with their own video/voice calling system and fractured their own userbase between Hangouts, Google Talk, Google Voice and now even Allo.
(No, being forced to run chrome just to see chats in a crappy corner window isn't experience on par with iMessage / Telegram / Viber).
Talk had a full-featured native phone app way back in Android 2.1 with multiple device support, which Allo still doesn't have today. I used it religiously on my Nexus One.
https://meet.jit.si/ works just in the browser. What's the problem?
By the time google talk came around, third party clients were easily connecting to all the other major IM services. I don't think the open protocol made any difference to its popularity.
XMPP is weird, true; it relies on opening an XML document and sending fragments of XML for the duration of the session and only closing the document at session completion. Very odd. But it performs extremely well. And once you get your head wrapped around the constraints, it's not so bad.
If the same GTalk was available on mobile, would I have installed WhatsApp?
[1] http://ircv3.org
IRC is just not the protocol of the future. There's far higher chances for Matrix to become popular or discord to be open sourced.
I'd love a totally OSS alternative to Slack. Maybe we'll see it with the recent Gitter acquisition?
communication is taboo for ads. and nothing on the Internet can have a fee. see the incompatibility?
Facebook is spending on IM because it bought the first IM that dissociated itself from the Internet. every whatsapp user see it as a sms and phone company alternative.
everyone else that live by ads (Google, yahoo, etc) will try their hand at IM, realize they can't use it for ads or ad targeting, and will scratch it.
Google has its own agenda and making an open and distributed internet that respect people privacy or wishes is not part of it.
If you currently use Hangouts for your Google Voice communication, there’s no need to change to the new apps, but you might want to try them out as we continue to bring new improvements.
W.T.F? Don't bring me into your internal office politics...
Then there's Allo because with all the above they made it too complicated to chat with someone or something. Also Duo, because video calling was completely missing from the offerings above (it wasn't).
Google: please just leave hangouts alone!
Also, regarding branding: even overlooking the shell-game Google is playing with regards to moving features around (SMS => Voice, SMS => Hangouts, SMS => ?), the branding was confusing from the outset:
- Google Chat (GChat) - Google Talk - Google Voice
These might as well be synonyms.
Google Talk is the original XMPP based chat system and was known informally as Gchat or Gtalk. There were web and desktop clients. Hangouts is the "new" proprietary messaging system from 2013. Google Talk and Hangouts are integrated at least for text messages but Hangouts adds lots of features like group video chat. Google Talk provides XMPP protocol access for federation and third-party clients.
Hangouts app on Android could do Hangouts, local SMS, and Google Voice SMS.
I find it interesting that there is less confusion about Apple Messages even though it was renamed from iChat to iMessages to Messages. The app also supports both SMS and iMessage protocol. In addition, iChat supported XMPP and third party clients until was shut down.
The reason people aren't confused is because Apple just renamed the app on people's iPhones but didn't screw anything up for them. They were never forced to switch from one app to another app, never had multiple apps that did roughly the same thing with competing standards, and they didn't migrate users from one platform to another losing data in the process.
I'll never trust a Google messaging app because of that mess, and frankly I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Gmail/Inbox too and will probably move off it soon.
For bonus confusion, the Google Messenger icon just says "Messenger" and is nearly indistinguishable from Facebook Messenger, a completely different system. Better keep track of which blue speech bubble is which.
Or something, I'm probably butchering the quote. There's a reason we can play CDs from any manufacturer in every manufacturer's player. Likewise SD cards, VHS videos, DVDs...
The importance of working with your competitors was well understood in the 1980's. Seem's it's a lesson we need to learn again: https://hbr.org/1989/01/collaborate-with-your-competitors-an...
They're too busy suspiciously eyeing each other's userbases to waste time on anything like long-term strategic thinking that benefits anyone but themselves. To be honest it feels like that kind of collaboration is long gone - it came about because it was necessary to actually serve consumers. But while someone who purchased a Compact Disc player is a Sony customer, a person who uses chat is not a Google customer - they're a SKU. The whole way the Internet tech industry is structured is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you wanted to encourage collaboration. By making users and their data a commodity instead of customers there's no benefit at all to improving their general experience.
Their executives need to get on a whiteboard and make a few simple mandates, such as:
1. There will be a single protocol for messaging across all Google properties, compatible with open protocols where feasible.
2. There will be a single “app icon” on Android, and single app on each major platform, for achieving communication. All legacy messaging services will be available from this point.
3. Every reasonable handle for identifying users will be supported, including: profile names, E-mail addresses, real names, and legacy messaging user IDs.
4. Effective immediately, every single team working on every Google chat product will report to Foobar McManager, whose compensation will depend directly on achieving integration goals by $DATE.
"Google discontinues Gmail and Search"
as a way to kickstart a conversation about our reliance on services, and whether we can blame companies for not subsidizing services we like and so on.
But then I realized it would just go sideways into a discussion about click bait and appropriate headlines, so I am posting it as a comment.
There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things.
This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better products; they use simpler paradigms and abstractions, have better combinable primitives, communicate purpose more effectively, and produce overall better tools.
The corollary is the stupid thing you can hack to do what you want is often better than the smart thing that is very carefully designed to do what you don't - because one of them you can technically use and the other you can't.
This is why earlier versions are frequently better than later ones and earlier products seem to do more, better, and faster. It's why smaller companies seem to produce better things, and counter-intuitively, products that take less time to finish (say a few days) seem to do better and gain more traction then the 6-month effort.
Some things really are profoundly complex, like databases and operating systems. Most things however, despite much we'd like to pretend, are not in that class of software.
And yes, these claims are cultural bomb-throwing. But the evidence for it is solid.
Realistically, if Google discontinued Gmail, people would move to other email providers. There's plenty of big ones.
BTW: Want to avoid being caught in that eventuality, but don't want to stop using Gmail? Buy yourself a personal domain name (for your last name or some such) on https://www.gandi.net/ and set up a redirect to your @gmail.com address. Your email is now john@smith instead of johnsmith@gmail. Congratulations, it looks a thousand times more professional, and you have it for life; if gmail dies, you can move providers without changing your email.
Gmail, well there are other client to use.
Search, umm, what can we do here? DuckGoGo?
Do you think Google has a moral responsibility to provide us with tools and time to make the transition?
And, how good do the tools have to be? Just a text dump is okay, or should you be able to give it your credentials and it can do the transfer? And then who decides how many services it should make easy?
Are we being responsible now by not thinking about it?
But suppose, for whatever reason, they decided gmail was not economical and was not bringing in enough money.
Do you think they are obligated to keep it around because our lives are on there?
What is their obligation, morally, and what is just a "nice" thing to do?
I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user experience.
I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as a hub - every chat system logs their history for a given contact into their contacts app, so I can open up a contact and see every communication app (even multiplayer games) and an interlined history for them all? That would make this work.
I could take the SMS, the chat, voice, even the dialer off the home screen and just have contacts - even a shortcut to my wife, so I could just open a person and then open a communication app for that person. That would work.
But without that, having a zillion small communication apps does not provide a good experience because the android home screen is a bad shell for lots of small apps. It's just a launcher that's good for big monolithic ones.
They are also removing Hangouts' SMS integration, BUT:
> Note: This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS.
That doesn't really make me feel great, it's only a matter of time before it changes again, and I'm quite sure the experience of staying in Hangouts will be awful in the meantime. This whole SMS + Hangouts + GV situation is such a clusterfuck, yet I feel a bit trapped in this ecosystem right now due to the stickiness of a phone number that family already remembers, and numerous business cards I've handed out.
I know they recently polished up the old GV app, but the FB Messenger + Whatsapp ecosystem looks so much nicer now... I wish I can just somehow hand them my GV number and leave this Google mess behind... or somehow redirect everyone to my carrier number.
I recently switched to Google Fi and opted to bring in my Google Voice number. Fi works okay, but now that it's a "real" number, if I were to switch to Verizon or something, I could port it there.
So you might consider that approach to get your phone number out of the ecosystem.
I ported my T-Mobile number into GV in 2013 when I switched to Android and Hangouts first added GV/SMS integration, so that I could send SMS from the desktop.
Then I ported my number back out to T-Mobile again in 2015 when I switched back to an iPhone and regained iMessage.
Google Talk : what is that? Is that the little box on the left hand side of the page on gmail that lets you chat with other gmail users?
Google Hangouts : different? I know it's videochat but it also has text ... a different thing?
The Android/Google phone chat app thingy --- is this different still?
obviously I'm not a regular google user at least not of these services
But then Google decided they didn't want Hangouts to be that anymore, and are stripping out features to focus it as the "corporate" messenger while they split its functionality into three different Android apps - Allo, Duo, and Messages.
So now Hangouts is just a desktop/mobile videochat and IM. No more SMS. And they have a "consumer-oriented" pair of voicechat and IM apps in Duo and Allo. But they're not compatible with Hangouts so if one user uses Hangouts and the other one uses Allo, they can't communicate directly.
Google has gone mad.
A few years later, Google rebranded Talk as Hangouts with a few new features, but for some inane reason left Talk available as a hidden option for those who wanted to use it over Hangouts.
Then, just because they felt like it, Google decided to integrate Google Voice, an online phone and text service, into Google Hangouts. This allowed you to make calls or send texts from the Hangouts app to regular phone numbers. To make matters even more confusing, Hangouts also served as an SMS app preinstalled on Nexus phones, which allowed this one app to send texts using Hangouts, Google Voice, or SMS.
Because Google has an unhealthily short attention span, they then decided to create an SMS-only app, which was intended to replace the SMS functionality of the Hangouts app. It seems that Google forgot they still had SMS functionality within the Hangouts app until now, and are finally removing it.
One would hope that was the end of it, but Google just couldn't make up its mind and released two new messaging and video calling apps, Allo and Duo respectively. Nobody knows what these are for, since Hangouts already has both of these features. They brought nothing new to the table and now are mostly unused.
We can only hope that Google decides to focus on one product sometime in the future, but that seems optimistic. For now, Hangouts is their priority, but I imagine that they'll be releasing a new messaging platform in the next year or two.
I thought they discontinued Talk years ago.
Or rather, since it came first, Hangouts was their name for the plan to eventually remove support for XMPP.
So many of my Gchat conversations have started because of the online status. I've hit up friends that I haven't talked to in over a year and had really great, synchronous, conversations because of it.
People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with people you didn't log into your IM client, if you wanted to chat with someone specifically there was a first class UI element for setting your status so you could tell others to leave you alone. Email and SMS were black holes where you only knew if your message was received via a response.
Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM someone. Read receipts are standard so you know if someone got your message. If someone's phone rings while you're eating, you're lucky if they apologize before answering, and you've won the lottery if they excuse themselves from the table.
It seems like we're all just sitting around waiting for an interruption to distract us from the life in front of us.
Idk... you damn kids need to get off my lawn.
So much for moving things forward, instead of falling into the dark ages of incompatible balkanized instance messaging services.
The messages I want to send or receive with a phone notification are a lot different from the ones people would exchange in the old days of IM.
I feel the same way.
They killed it and now it's an awful behemoth google hangouts window. Really disappointing.
is a really neat replacement. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much longer hangouts as a whole is going to last (didn't they say they were discontinuing it from consumer space?)
I click a hangout link for a work call and get "no one in the call". I have to add authuser=1 to the URL manually to see that it's actually that I don't have permission to it.
I think this is because they use a different URL in meeting invites than the one registered for the Hangouts app.
It's been a bug for ages, and AFAICT they just don't care.
Everything is ephemeral.
Google's problem is that they don't keep services around long enough nor do they plan a reasonable migration strategy for when they shutter them.
But having three (four? I honestly don't know) competing services from a single provider and playing "guess which one's the evil twin" is shitty.
- Google Talk
- Hangouts Meet
- Hangouts Chat
- Android Messages (something new, never heard of it)
(And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS).
How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.
Also, Hangouts "the original" (aka. the Hangouts App, Chrome Extension, Chrome App, Gmail Widget, and the standalone website) -- most of which will probably live on. The extra irony is that the same time Hangouts App users are being warned to move to a different app for mobile text messages, GTalk users are being told to switch to Hangouts, while Google Voice users are being assured that their Google Voice texts (and presumably calls) will keep working within the Hangouts App, even though a new Google Voice App was recently released that mysteriously added chat.
Then there's Allo, Duo...
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14721602/android-messages-...
Officially it's only supported in emerging markets, but you can download it from apkmirror and it'll install just fine.
The worst I've done is accidentally send a Facebook "thumbs up" in an inappropriate context, but it's easy to imagine how you could do much worse.
If I ask someone what app or service they used to send me a message I didn't see, they can't really tell me.
Increasingly they don't even know if they sent a text message or something else entirely.
Android Messages is an SMS-only app; your device vendor probably has their own default one, but if not (or if you don't like it) you can use the Google one. (It's not that new, it's been around since about the time they announced the new direction for Hangouts, long before they implemented the new enterprise-focussed Hangouts offerings.)
And GTalk is being buried, so isnt really an issue.
Here's the Google Messaging landscape as far as I know it:
- Google Talk in Gmail: I think this is what my work account has, and what they're shutting down: http://imgur.com/Z0v6Zjq This one is pretty useful because you can initiate a new Hangouts Video call right from this interface, as well as open up the Google Talk Voice POTS Dialer (?)
- Google Hangouts Messaging in Gmail: I think this what my personal account has, and perhaps what's sticking around? http://imgur.com/dBf7me2 This interface clearly got upgraded a bit, but removed the ability to create a new Hangouts Video call unless you're initiating it with a specific person (or I couldn't find the place to do it)
- Google Hangouts for Android: This is a dual Hangouts and SMS client that supposedly will send messages with the two services above ^, plus over SMS to your carrier contacts. This is also being discontinued?
- Android Messaging: Sounds like a new app that's coming out which will replace the SMS side of the above existing Hangouts app
- Hangouts Chat: This is the new app that's going to replace the IP-based messaging feature of the current Google Hangouts for Android, right?
- Hangouts Meet: This is the new app that's going to replace the video and screensharing portion of Hangouts for Android it sounds like. Why these two are now separate apps is beyond me. But it sounds like these two will interoperate with Google Hangouts in Gmail (the second screenshot), and the first one is disappearing and/or being converted into the second. OK, I think I'm staring to figure this out...
- Google Voice: Oh don't get me started on Voice. I've been a Voice user forever, and we finally got an upgrade! Which made no sense, because I thought they were killing it? But now they're not? So now Voice is purely for SMS-based communication, and would be an alternative to Android Messaging, just as it always was (with its new web client as well). But if you were one of the unlucky people who chose to integrate your GVoice SMS experience into Hangouts for Android, I guess you can still use that? Supposedly that's still supported, but I didn't, and I fear for whoever ends up with that experience...
- Hangouts Dialer for Android: This is / was the POTS dialer that integrated with Hangouts, and allowed you to dial any POTS number over VoIP. AND it lightly integrates with Google Voice, because it uses your GVoice number and balance for international calls. BONUS: It can also /receive/ inbound calls that are placed inbound to your GVoice number, OR from Google Talk, because "Google Talk" was considered a "forwarding phone" as as Voice was concerned. Is that part going away? Can you "call" people over GTalk now? Sounds like no, but you can still "Hangouts Meet" with them, and if you have the Android client, it will ring your phone? I guess that makes sense... What about inbound calls to your GVoice number and being able to answer them over VoIP? That works today, and it'd be a real bummer if it went a way.
- Google Allo: Hey remember this? Probably not even though it's only less than a year old. This is an entirely separate walled garden of a messaging app that allows you to Allo (text chat) other Allo users. But it also DOES have an SMS bridge (surprise!), and you can Allo non-Allo users, however the receiving SMS end is still a little questionable and is more meant as a user-acquisition funnel than a transparent GVoice-like experience. I believe this was meant to be a WhatsApp clone, but nobody uses it.
- Google Duo: And then there's this thing? I guess it's almost identical to Hangouts Meet now? Maybe Hangouts Meet is for Business® users and Duo is for your friends and family? Maybe Duo uses voice recognition to censor all business communication? (That was a joke, but...)
It's just that simple! Screw Google and whoever is running their messaging division. Except I think that's the problem: nobody is. Which is why this post exists.
I still think Wave could have solved all of our problems...
Nobody is. AFAIK, they're basically all from different divisions of the company, and that's why it's a total clusterfuck.
The worst part is they have tons of really great things, but rather than improving and working on getting more users they keep starting over.
I feel like at one point they were working towards an experience where you could:
* text, voice or video chat (and flip between them in any conversation at any point)
* in 1-1 or in groups
* integrate with PSTN voice and SMS (to the extent possible)
* access across several platforms (with a seamless experience if you move from one device to another midway) including native PC, web-based, and Android apps
They got like 80% of the way there -- then just gave up, and everything they are doing now is just on its own randomly wandering path with no cohesive vision.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/04/google-brings-rcs-the-next...
This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?
You could always keep them separate, if you wanted to. This feature was totally invisible to people who left it turned off.
I personally want to have all my messaging in one place, which used to be possible. Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how each person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app, find their name, and then message them. It's incredibly frustrating to have a worse 2017 messaging experience than I did in 2007 with my BlackBerry.
> This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?
Chat in Gmail is Hangouts.
The sales revenue is so high for their click model, their best minds are working on how to get people to click on ad's for shoes. Needs a shake up at Google, for sure. It's time.
Maybe everyone having to pass their fabled "white board" coding interview is leaving creative minds behind? Everyone just knows the best way to do a binary sort, and not much more. That's my thinking.
I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years due to the Google Plus requirement there also.
Same. I purposefully stopped reviewing products on the Play/App store as soon as they forced you to use your G+ profile. Why on Earth does my real name or main profile need to be associated with a short app review?
What kind of sense does that make? Does this mean that Voice and Fi users can't use Android Messages for SMS? And what about MMS?
I'm asking this more from a developer perspective: lets suppose one wants to integrate their app with google "chat / collaboration" systems (like one can integrate with Slack, Facebook, etc.). What to do?
I have feeling that Google executives are thinking something like this "lets just buy Slack and call the day".
What are you thoughts about this?
[1] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3002204/google-is-s...
What do you mean? Google Assistant is now available for almost every Android device, it has replaced Google Now and can be invoked like you invoked Google Now before.
personally i would not mind if we would use email as chat, there are already clients able to do that, it would solve lot of problems
As someone who administrates a small SMTP peering group with a friend, I'm constantly baffled by the reinvention of the wheel. Presence could be easily signalled by messages which degrade gracefully. i.e. send a human-readable email that says you're online or offline, with a presence header verified by DKIM/SPF/DMARC, or you could even revive Finger. Use whatever protocol between the mailserver and the client.
They're losing a lot of points with customers with the "have 10 teams make 10 apps that do the same thing and slowly kill off support before discontinuing" model.
Actually, has anyone migrated away from Google voice to a better service ? I would be willing to pay a little bit.
Everything short of gmail that they have tried to make work has failed. They don't innovate. They create short lived products that bring in no extra ad revenue. Google is ripe for being replaced. It's big but so was MS. You may love Google to death. I think they are a company with no vision, no innovation, and are milking the ad revenue teet. Someone is going to replace them.
They have an almost-monopoly on the advertising space, their resources and size make it difficult for others to compete with them, and they treat their users like dirt. Wait sorry, they don't have any users, they have products. And they treat those like dirt.
Google Talk was really good, I miss a simple communication app like it was. The best I ever used, on my opinion.
used wechat because lived in China, but uninstalled everything Chinese after leaving that place, tried Facebook messenger (later Lite) for few months until decided i don't really need to have Facebook account and anything to do with Facebook, which means i ain't gonna install WhatsApp either, so there are not many other options left
The future is disarray, just like the present and just like the past.
IM isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve, even at scale. (and certainly not at startup scale)
It's not a good advertising medium, and nobody will ever spend significant money in that space.
It's an add-on feel good service.
* commitment
* nice UI
* nice add-on services
Putting Skype's privacy and issues aside, it has proven to be a very successful IM product for the past decade.
Slack, HipChat are more geared toward developers / tech workers.
IRC is probably one of the oldest and still widely used because of its simplicity (once you know how to use it, it's easy to use)
If you merge all of them together, and have a real product team to support the product forward, it won't be hard. Of course, if your goal is to integrate with 20 other services, yeah, you will run out lucky hitting someone's walled garden.
1) With the removal of SMS from Hangouts on Android does anyone know if this affects SMS in Hangouts on ChromeOS? 2) Is retiring a euphemism for killing in terms of Google Labs additions or does this mean they will still work, but won't be made available to new users?
Thanks.
Does anyone know of a comprehensive timeline of all the various permutations? I would read it just to boggle at how many poor decisions could be made by a single company in a single category.
Whaaaat? Emailing profiles was the most useful part of g+
If like basically everyone relevant, you use Pidgin to directly chat with Hangouts users and to hang out on IRC (the federated protocol that actually succeeded in the marketplace), then you don't care.
I genuinely don't understand the outrage in support of XMPP. It didn't work out guys. IRC tuns out to be all anyone actually wanted, and to the extent that's not true, it would have been eaten by Slack anyway.
They want to release and try new things but also still be focused on the big money makers.
That means expect a lot of crap from Google like wave, allo, duo, buzz etc. Some hotshot inside Google wants a promo and pushes new products like popcorn.
But Google management needs to show $$$ so they need to focus on the big cows: search & ads.
In Steve Jobs era a ton of shit would never even see the light of day.
Google literally has so much money and resources that it actually hurts them innovating.
Their best strategy is to acquire products with good market fit and scale the shit out of them.
"Looks like June 26 may be the final curtain call for Google Voice. Google today announced that it's finally pulling the plug on Google Chat upon which Google Voice relies on the Asterisk platform."
Fuck you, Google. Just fuck you...
For what I understand I will be able to login via Pidgin into my Gmail account, but not from a custom domain, am I right?
Either way, GTalk was such a clean, centered and small IM experiencie +10 years ago, Hangouts is just a mess.
From a user perspective, it is a bad play. Just like Google Reader, there were users that relied on the software. While it may save them money, it hurts them in other ways.
only thing I have added is Signal because why not have one more messenger if it's bundled with SMS anyway
when living in China was forced to use Wechat but got rid off that spyware immediately after moving outside, them had short stint with Facebook Messenger (Lite) until I decided it's not worth to do any business with Facebook which is reason why I don't have WhatsApp
I think I provide enough options for people to reach me with email, SMS, Skype (video/chat), Signal (video/chat)
so in the end i have 4 apps in phone covering all my communication - AOSP Email, AOSP Dialer, Skype Lite and Signal
For me, this means it basically still exists and my user experience is the same.
Google is just proving how unreliable it is as a company. I have ditched by Gmail account before they ditch me.
Same with Chrome too.
> Google Talk launched in 2005 as a simple chat experience
To quote Inigo Montoya, 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'
> As part of our continued effort to focus Google+ around shared interests, we’re retiring two legacy Google+ features in Gmail: the ability to email Google+ profiles and the use of Google+ Circles.
Sad to see Circles die — that's what was compelling about Google+. I don't even know what it is now.
What does this actually mean?
